There are different kinds of mobile in the market that use different platforms or operating system (OS) such as iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows etc. Developers tend to choose a platform that helps them to develop the applications in one common language that would be supported by all the popular platform. This is called as the cross platform mobile development.

The cross-platform technologies can be used in more devices & platforms with writing a minimal amount of source code. There are many advantages with this approach.

Cross Platform Frameworks

PhoneGap is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) framework that helps you to develop apps for the following devices.

iPhone

iTouch

iPad

Android

Palm

Symbian

BlackBerry

PhoneGap is the ONLY open source mobile framework that supports seven (7) platforms. It uses web development languages such as JavaScript and HTML. It also allows for access to hardware features including GPS/location data, accelerometer, camera, sound and more.

The company offers a cross-platform simulator (an Adobe AIR app), as well as online training sessions to help you access native APIs and build functioning mobile apps on the PhoneGap platform

How it works?

1. Build your app once with web-standards

Based on HTML5, PhoneGap leverages web technologies that developers already know best such as HTML and JavaScript.

2. Wrap it with PhoneGap

Get access to native APIs using the free open source framework or PhoneGap build.

RhoMobile is a cross-platform mobile application tool. Rhode allows the developers to develop native apps that will suit a range of smartphone devices and operating system. The OS supported by Rhomobile's native apps are:

iPhone

Android

Windows Mobile

RIM

Symbian

The code written once using the framework can be used to build apps for all major smartphones. Apart from available hardware, native apps utilizes GPS, camera, as well as location data. This tool has the following facilities to build apps.

1. Rhode - an open source ruby-based framework.

Rhodes is used to rapidly build native apps for all major smartphone operating systems. These are true native device applications (NOT mobile web apps) which work with synchronized local data and take advantage of device capabilities such as GPS, PIM contacts and calendar, camera, native mapping, push, barcode, signature capture, Bluetooth and Near Field Communications (NFC). Rhodes can be used to develop apps built on HTML and ruby Rhodes is the ONLY framework with:

support for Model View Controller (other frameworks force you to put all business logic into the view as JavaScript)

synchronized data

support for ALL devices and tablets

a hosted build service

true industrial device capabilities such as NFC

2. RhoHub, a hosted development environment.

RhoHub makes building Rhodes applications even easier, reducing the overhead of getting started and as well as streamlining ongoing development effort.

RhoHub allows to create an account with it.

RhoHub guides you through to create projects with working skeleton.

Your project will be hosted in a Git repository by RhoHub.

With RhoHub you can pick just one platform SDK for local development and then use the hosted build capability to build and test the other platforms. This saves significant setup time for developers and creates an efficient workflow.

RhoSync is a synchronization framework consisting of a client component on the device and a server component that runs on any server capable of running Ruby. RhoSync keeps enterprise app data current and available on users' smartphones. The information is stored locally on a user's device and available even when disconnected and offline.

Once RhoSync is installed it is ready to build a RhoSync source to integrate with your backend application.

To define a RhoSync source you just need to identify a handful of operations to interact with your backend data source: login, query, sync, create, update, delete and logoff

RhoSync can work with any protocol

RhoSync consists of the following components:

Synchronization Framework

REST API

Administration Web Console

Asynchronous Job System

Titanium Development

Titanium Framework allows you to develop cross-platform applications using one code base. In particular, Titanium Mobile allows to develop apps for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices. Mobile applications on Titanium are coded with JavaScript and built to almost native binaries for each platform.

Titanium by Appcelerator is one of the best cross-platform solutions for iPhone, iPad and Android development. Titanium makes cross-platform native application development easy. Titanium uses a developer-friendly javascript syntax with custom APIs and methods that get translated and cross-compiled to native Objective-C and Java. The apps are not HTML/CSS web views wrapped in a "native" package - they are real native apps with native UI components.

Titanium applications are divided into 4 main parts:

1.The html/css/javascript code that makes up the core application logic and UI

2. The APIs that access native device/desktop functionality, analytics or other modular functionality

4. The run-time shell that packages the application for cross-platform distribution.

Once built, Titanium-based applications can be tested, packaged, and distributed through the Appcelerator Network's cloud services. Since Titanium platform is an open source, the source code can be accessed at any time to the complete application.

Some of the characteristics of Titanium are:

1. Rich multimedia

Titanium offers music, photo and video streaming/storing on a user's device as well as custom video playback controls

2. Flexible Storage: Filesystem, Database On Device

Store user preferences, save data files, or implement the mobile version of a cookie using SQL Lite and the iPhone / Android's native file system.

3. Unlimited Extensibility

Titanium's plug-in architecture allows you to code modules in Objective-C or Java, extend your mobile app with custom native functionality and then call those modules using Javascript in Titanium.

4. Access the Camera or Video Camera

Snap a photo or video, store it on the phone, and push it to Flickr, Youtube, or your website.

5. HTML5 and CSS3 support

Built on top of the latest Webkit rendering engine, Titanium lets you develop advanced animations and sophisticated interfaces.